I got it working. There was a hard-coded --no-plugins being passed to bzr in /usr/local/bin/sv_membersh .
Does anyone see any issue with removing that? I don't see one myself. The original motivation is contained in the thread http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers-public/2010-03/msg00026.html Things have changed since then. sftp access is no longer allowed since later that year. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers-public/2010-10/msg00015.html IIUC, the concern was that users might somehow be able to install plugins and thus do arbitrary things. I really don't see how they could. As a normal Savannah user, I have no access to ~gm/.bazaar/, do I? In any case, /usr/local/bin/sv_membersh runs bzr with HOME == /var/lib/bzr. Also, I added a setting BZR_PLUGIN_PATH = '-user:+core:-site'. This option did not exist back in 2010. It disables all plugins except core ones that come with bzr. Ref: http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr.2.5/en/user-reference/configuration-help.html So I think it is ok? Of course, it still could break somehow after a week or so of use, like bzr-hookless-email did... If it seems ok, I will switch Emacs to use this rather than the bzr-hookless-email cron job. As bonuses: commit notifications are immediate rather than hourly, and users can turn notifications on and off for their own branches rather than having to ask Savannah admins to do it.